The Stars are Dying : (Nytefall: Book 1)

“I wish that room had been empty,” I said.

I didn’t know how many days had passed. Each one dragged me deeper and deeper into the greatest test of physical endurance I’d ever felt. I was so fucking angry.

Sitting with my back to Nyte, I tipped my head back against the cell bars. We hardly spoke. But he never left. He sat against the wall behind me.

“No, you don’t.”

I laughed, mocking his confidence. My head rocked—barely a shake when it felt like a boulder atop my shoulders. My limbs were weak, arms limp at my sides. “I had an uncomplicated life,” I reflected to myself, closing my eyes as even the moonlight I loved added to my throbbing headache. “Why couldn’t I have just been content?”

“You were dying slowly. Your spirit. It was never destined to be contained. You were surviving, not living.”

“You don’t know that. You don’t know anything about me.”

“You know that’s not true either.”

“Then it’s not fair—!” My palm stung against the stone as I slapped it. My emotions were exhausting. Triggering. I couldn’t contain them. “You promised no more secrets. Everything we had was formed of them.”

“Does it not speak truer to your feelings now there is nothing to influence them?”

“Not when everything I was falling for wasn’t real. You were never real. Only what I wanted you to be.”

“You don’t believe that.”

I smiled though he couldn’t see it. Something dark and ugly within me wanted to take his notes of hurt, amplify them, and kill him with them. “You’re just like him,” I drawled. “He would lock me away and say it was for my own good. That he was helping me.”

“Do not compare me to him.” The threat that crept over my shoulder broke a shiver. I delighted in it.

I went on, “You all like to think you’re different. Everyone believes their intentions are the right ones. But you are all different faces of the same monster.”

Shuffling sounded behind me. I didn’t care to move. Maybe I hoped he would reach his hands through the bars and wrap them around my throat to end my misery instead.

He didn’t.

I felt him behind me, sliding down to sit until the warmth of his back seeped through mine between the iron bars.

“You’re right,” he said calmly.

My brow pinched. I was in so much pain I wondered if heartbreak could kill.

“Sometimes…I wish I wasn’t the villain I was born to be. I think that is life’s true challenge, to make us want things that were never meant to be ours, and to be anything other than what is paved for us in destiny.”

A tear slipped down my cheek and my eyes closed. “Do you think destinies can change?” I asked quietly.

Nyte let a few seconds of heavy silence pass. “I used to.”

“What happened?”

“You died.”

My palm remained flattened close to the bars, and then sparks caught on them as Nyte reached back to brush my fingers with his as though he needed to be reminded that I was there. I didn’t move, but a fist clenched in my chest at the first contact he’d made since locking me in here.

“The story you told me,” I whispered. My harsh exterior was breaking. “In my rooms as we lay… It was us.”

One beat of silence. The kind shattered souls were made of.

“I have waited more than three hundred years for you to come back,” he said, equally as hushed. “I came to terms with believing it wouldn’t matter when I couldn’t find a way to break the curse of our clashing existence. Then, when I became trapped…I can’t deny there was a selfish part of me that didn’t give a fuck about the world, or that my father and brother had betrayed me, because I would get to see you again.”

I thought back to the moment we’d met, finding myself reflecting on everything in my mind and from when he’d become physical to me. He was my night. The embrace of darkness that whispered through the stars.

“When did you realize?” he asked carefully. “That you were the star-maiden?”

It was a question I had posed to myself.

“I think a part of me has always known,” I whispered. My nose stung. “I didn’t want to be different; I just wanted to be seen. My markings…Hektor made me believe they were nothing, yet he wouldn’t allow them to be seen, and I thought that was the reason. Sometimes I’d see similar metallic tattoos on others, but there was something different about theirs, and I wondered if they found beauty in them to have had them cast by Starlight Matter. Then there were things I discovered about myself that I didn’t think I should be capable of. I could throw daggers with great precision—even archery I found easy, as if these skills were already learned. And then…I’ve always braced for the dawn and yearned for the night. I found I didn’t need as much sleep as others.”

“It’s a lot to believe at once.”

“I don’t remember much. I don’t remember you.”

“Do you want to?”

Another tear fell. “I don’t know.”

We stayed like that for a pretend moment of peace. Until I broke it with my most terrifying doubt.

“Did you kill me?”

“No. But I condemned you.”

My fingers flinched against his. I debated pulling away if I was holding the hand of my killer. There must be something twisted and wrong with me because I didn’t.

“What does that mean?”

“It means I failed you even if it wasn’t my hand to wield the weapon. You were always at risk because of me.”

More questions surfaced with every answer, but I was too tired to learn it all right now. Too gods-damned exhausted and focused on only one thing that could take it away.

I was a pitiful fool and beginning to see exactly how I’d lost the war with my weak heart. There was no reason for me to be back.

I stole my hand away from his. “The world will be better without me. You can have the key when you get it back. Give it to whoever can use it to save people. There is no point in giving me power.”

“This is just your withdrawal speaking.”

My teeth ground together, rage boiling my already sweat-slicked skin, yet I was fucking freezing at the same time.

He said carefully, “You should be keeping warm to break the fever.”

My heavy eyes rolled to the bed. The cot was feeble, but he’d brought me more soft blankets and pillows than necessary. Such luxury appeared ridiculous against the gloom of my cage.

“And you need to eat,” he added.

There was a broth now cold on a tray near me. I hadn’t touched it, only drinking the water when I couldn’t take the scratch of my throat any longer. There was only one thing I craved to consume, and he denied it.

“I don’t want power,” I tried again, this circle we’d gone around in many times now. “Please, Nyte.”

“You’re doing great, Starlight.”

“Don’t call me that!” I ached in my heart to hear it, and I didn’t want to feel for him.

My head lifted only to slam back against the iron in my frustration. It vibrated through my skull, rippled my vision, but I did it again. And again. Until hands slipped around my head to prevent the harm to myself, and I broke. My sobs unleashed themselves, and I hadn’t realized how close they’d been to flooding me.

When Nyte pulled me to my knees I didn’t resist. I clutched him tightly, as if he were a lifeline, crying into his chest though every heave hurt so badly, so deeply, it tore my soul.

“Why did he do this to me?”

I was dying.

All that kept me here was Nyte’s gentle strokes over my hair, his warmth holding me tight. I was too exhausted to put on a front that I didn’t want it. Because I needed it.

“You have no idea, love,” he said, a crack in his voice slowing me from hyperventilating, “how I would tear my own heart from my chest if it could help you right now.”

I pressed my ear to his chest and floated back to the fast cadence of his heartbeat, pounding with what touched me like panic and guilt. “Why did you do this to me?” I croaked.

“I didn’t mean to.” Every time his voice was reduced to such an ache I couldn’t bear it. I wanted to believe he couldn’t feel such pain to make it easier to kill him. “I wish my father never brought me here. To save you, maybe I wish we’d never met.”

Coming from him, that notion silenced my world. It seemed unfathomable. Not now. I hadn’t meant what I’d said, but he’d confessed it with a clear, certain mind…

“You wish we’d never met?”

It was all I could take from it. His words pummeled into me worse than my withdrawal from the pills. I didn’t need them. No—the only thing I needed was him.

“I’m too much of a selfish bastard to truly wish that.”

I relaxed. These dark thoughts kept taunting me, and I couldn’t tell what was truly my feelings or those of someone depraved as the Matter left my system, twisting my mind to something murky and resentful.

“What happens when it’s all gone?” I asked with trickling trepidation. Did I want to know what had been lingering under my skin? What I could be capable of?

“Truthfully, I don’t know.”

“What if I hurt someone?”

“I won’t let that happen.”

The fact he didn’t rule it out made me shudder.

I shook my head. “It’s not worth the risk. Just let me take the medicine.”

“It is not medicine,” he snarled.

I whimpered at his tone, at my desperation for the Matter still rising in me, trying to suppress the manipulation that would test all his emotions and spark something to get him to break for me.

Pushing away from him, I stood, my teeth bashing together. My slicked skin didn’t want the wrap of the blankets either.

“Let me help you again—”

“No!” My hand fisted around my dagger, but as I lunged for him my slice cut through dispersing shadow.

“Fucking coward,” I mumbled. With a spike of anger I threw the dagger across the cell. Then exhaustion took its toll, and I covered my face.

“What are you thinking right now?” he coaxed.

“That you were right,” I said. Defeat lowered me to the cot. I curled away from him, mapping the cracks in the sad gray wall. “I don’t like the monster I’ve denied for so long it’s taking over.”

“No, it isn’t. You’re almost through the worst of your withdrawal. Your emotions are exhausting you, and they are not true.”

“They are true,” I said. “They don’t come from nowhere, Nyte.”

He didn’t answer. I listened to him sit again. He hadn’t brought a chair. He hadn’t brought anything of comfort for himself.

He never left.